Living and doing business in South Africa you forget how small your buying market is in comparison to other countries. The SA market has only a pool of 11 million tax payers out of roughly 60 million people. The 49 million basically do not exist and your customer base target is very small and possibly less than 50% of the 11 million. Just because you pay tax doesn't men you can afford to buy anything and guess plenty are maxed out on credit already.
We are possibly 2 months away from going live on Amazon and need to finalise a few things first. Amazon have not officially gone live themselves yet and why there has been no huge rush on our part. We have been loading items weekly which takes time and plenty of thought as he words you use play a pivotal role in how successful your sales will be.
The items we will be selling more importantly are all protected from Amazon themselves. You are their client, but their aim is to take control removing you from the transaction once they have the factory details and then will deal directly with them. You have to see Amazon for what they are and they are not about having million of sellers because they would prefer only one being themselves. You either own the factory or the brand or have the licensing in place for that brand within that country or you have no future with Amazon.
What we have is all of the above and kind of saw through what Amazon have done to others and why we have gone don the route we have. If you control the factories via legal partnerships then they cannot squeeze you out.
We are not looking at the local market because it is way too small and we need bigger numbers. I was given some information yesterday regarding one company who supplies a mattress in a box for the UK market and guess Europe would be part of that number as well. They sell on average 679 mattresses every single day and think you would be lucky if you did that per month in SA.
The flooring items we have lined up will be popular in the US market and Europe with the one big factor on our side being the exchange rates making these items rather affordable. There is no other competition as there is nothing that is even remotely similar and we own the patent on this product or to be more precise the factory partner does.
If one can be selling nearly 700 beds per day in a competitive market then I literally have no clue how much flooring can be sold daily or weekly when there are no competitors. I have been keeping investment money back for the just in case we need more raw material due to a bigger demand than expected which would be a good problem to have to face. This is the beauty of what Amazon has to offer as suddenly the pond you are dealing with is global and far far bigger beyond anything you can comprehend.